Steve James' acclaimed new documentary The Interrupters about the Cease Fire community activist violence prevention volunteer organization in Chicago has been a genuine box office smash in its own city. The film, which officially concluded two week run at the Gene Siskel Film Center Thursday night is, according to today's Chicago Tribune, the biggest box office success in the 40 year history of the Center.

Irvine Welsh & Director Rob Heydon Talk About Bringing The Adaptation To LifeWhen Danny Boyle delivered the groundbreaking "Trainspotting" it proved that the unique language, tenor and prose of Scottish writer Irvine Welsh could be brought to the big screen with both style and substance. An adaptation of "The Acid House" soon followed and "Filth" is gearing up to shoot next year, and the next Welsh story to hit the big screen will be "Ecstasy." But it was no easy journey.

Ah, the dog days of August. Used to be that this month was just another typical dumping ground for films that withered on the vine, but it in recent years, it's expanded a bit to swallow up some of the summer blockbuster fare crowded out of May-June-July. But the last weekend in August? Yeesh. Kids are going back to school, college students are back on campus, and everyone's depressed because summer's ending. That psychological breakdown attempts to explain the box office offerings for this weekend. Katie Holmes gets scared in "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark," Sundance comedy "Our Idiot Brother" takes advantage of the roomy playing field, and B-action flick "Colombiana" does the same. If you're not soaking up the last dregs of summer out of doors this weekend, or battening down the hatches on the East Coast with the arrival of Hurricane Irene, here are the releases available at your multiplex or art house.

Sometimes one can admire a film without truly liking it; that’s how I feel about the ambitious British remake of Brighton Rock. Graham Greene’s 1938 novel, first filmed in the late 1940s, has been cleverly reworked to take place in 1964, at the time of the “mods and rockers” riots in Brighton, signifying a time of change in England. That is just one of many clever moves by writer-director Rowan Joffe, who is able to explore some of the seamier aspects of the novel that censorship (and matters of taste) made impossible in 1947.

Well, with so many directors dipping their toes in the water of television, not everything is going to make it, and unfortunately for Mark Romanek's "Locke & Key," the pilot episode of the mooted gothic horror/drama never even got to air. Those lucky enough to be in San Diego in July for Comic-Con were treated to a screening of the pilot, but if you weren't around to catch, this trailer will likely be the only peek you'll ever get at what Romanek cooked up.

Evan Ross welcomes 23 today. His list of film credits include ATL, Life Support, Pride, Life Is Hot In Cracktown, Moozlum, Case 219 and 96 Minutes in which he won the Breakthrough Performance Award at the 2011 SXSW Film Festival. The Family Tree, a comedic indie flick he also appears in, will hit theaters in New York and Los Angeles today.

A major surprise for me this week is Trisha Ziff's documentary "The Mexican Suitcase," which begins an Oscar-qualifying run at NYC's IFC Center today as part of DocuWeeks (the Los Angeles run begins September 2). Fascinating on multiple levels, the film tells the story of a case (in reality three cases) of negatives legendary to photo historians and found in Mexico City in the 1990s. Inside are 4500 photographs taken by famed war correspondents Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David "Chim" Seymour during the Spanish Civil War, all thought completely lost for almost 70 years (they weren't recovered and revealed to the world's attention until 2007, when Ziff retrieved them). To put it in perspective for cinephiles, it's kind of like when the extended cut of "Metropolis" was recently rediscovered in Argentina. Literary nerds, imagine if Hemingway's early manuscripts (the ones infamously lost in 1922) suddenly turned up.